A few weeks ago we brought you news of a new palmtop computer for hackers, powered by the new Espressif ESP32-P4 application processor. The Tanmatsu (Japanese for “Terminal”) is a compact handheld device with a QWERTY keyboard and an 800×480 DSI display, and while it currently exists at the final prototype stage there is a pre-order page upon which you can reserve an early production model for yourself. We’ve been lucky enough to be invited to give one a close-up inspection, so it was time to hot-foot it on the train to a Dutch hackerspace in order to bring you a preview.
A Little History, And First Impressions
Before looking at the device, it’s time for a little history. The Tanmatsu has its origin in badge.team, the Netherlands-based group that has produced so many European event badges over the years, and it was destined to eventually become the badge for the upcoming WHY2025 hacker camp. As sometimes happens in any community there has been a significant difference of opinion between the event orga and the badge.team folks that it’s inappropriate to go into here, so now it exists as a standalone project. It’s destined to be open-source in its entirety including hardware and software (and we will hold them to that, never fear), but because of the events surrounding its conception the full repositories will be not be made public until some time late in the summer.
Picking the Tanmatsu up and holding it, it’s a rectangular slab a bit larger and thicker than a CD case with that QWERTY keyboard and display on its front face, an array of ports including an SMA socket for a LoRA antenna on its sides, and an expansion connector on its rear. It has a sandwich construction, with a PCB front face, a 3D printed spacer, the PCB itself, and a 3D printed back cover all held together with a set of screws. The recesses on its bottom edge and the lower halves of the sides locate neatly with fingers and thumbs when it’s held in two hands for two-thumb typing. The keyboard is a silicone moulding as is common on this type of device, and while the keys are quite small it was not difficult to type on it. The display meanwhile feels of much higher quality than the SPI parts previously seen on badges.
A Hardware Quick Tour
Unscrewing the rear cover, and the circuitry is revealed. We must apologise for only having a mobile phone to hand to take photographs, but from the accompanying image you should be able to identify the main parts. In the centre of the board is the P4 processor, above it is an ESP32-C6 which does the job of a network card. To the left of that is an Ai-Thinker Ra-01SH LoRA module, and to the right is the power circuitry. Mid-right is a USB hub chip for the USB-A and USB-C sockets, and the microcontrollers. Below the P4 is an expansion connector, to the left of which is an audio DAC and amplifier with 3.5mm socket, and to the right of which is a CH32 microcontroller. This last component serves the keyboard, and performs housekeeping tasks for the device. The peripheral connectors aside from those already mentioned include a PMOD that doubles as JTAG and SAO, a micro SD socket, a Qwiic connector, and a camera connector that is compatible with certain Raspberry Pi cameras. Finally, there are three physical buttons on the left hand side. The battery, below the bottom of the photo, is the usual LiPo pouch cell with built-in protection, and it sits under the keyboard. On the front of the board next to the screen are some addressable LEDs. Having seen several earlier prototypes and now having held this production-ready model, we can say that the accumulated experience of the team behind it in making event badges really shows. It feels solid and ready for manufacture, and looking at the component choices we don’t find ourselves concerned by inappropriate connectors or annoying layouts.
The expansion port on the back is intended to foster an ecosystem of clip-on add-ons, with early signs of boards such as a Flipper Zero style RF hacking device and a companion board with interfaces for talking to computers in data centres being in the works. It is said that boards with MIDI, a high quality audio codec, and a camera, will follow.
What About The Software?
The best hardware in the world is of limited use without software, so it’s time to look at this side of the device, The team behind the Tanmatsu have a history of producing badges with a common operating system platform supporting an app infrastructure, and this one continues that legacy.
It’s a new version of their OS for the P4, and we understand that as with the MCH2022 badge OS it is adapted from the AppFS system originally written for the PocketSprite game console, with the addition of a GUI launcher and an open source badge.team app store. It will support apps written in high level scripting languages such as MicroPython, as well as native apps compiled for the P4. The device we were handling had the OS with GUI and launcher, and a single name badge app installed. On an earlier prototype though, we saw work in progress on more useful apps, and even an x86 PC emulator running Windows 3.0. It’s clear that the OS is being designed for a productive pocket computer rather than a toy badge, and this is something we’ll give a more detailed look in the future.
In Conclusion
Having given the Tanmatsu a detailed physical examination and seen the operating system as it exists today, our conclusion is that it’s a device which is physically well-designed and ready for manufacture, and like the badges produced in the past by the same team, it shows every indication of being delivered on time and with working software. As we said earlier it will be fully open-sourced in the summer and we will hold them to that, and thus it’s a device that we’re quite excited about.
As a general purpose hacker’s palmtop computer it occupies an interesting space between devices such as the Flipper Zero or existing event badges, and Linux-based devices such as the uConsole or Raspberry Pi based machines. We think it wins handsomely over the Linux devices on price, so for anyone who wants the extra power of the full-fat OS the question becomes whether that convenience is worth the expenditure. If you want one they can be pre-ordered for €99.17 (about $102) if you are outside the EU and don’t have to pay sales tax, or €120 with the tax included for EU customers. We’ve got one on order, and we’ll being you our full review when it lands.
i’m just absolutely bewildered by the idea that hackaday will “hold them to” open source.
i don’t have any reason to doubt the intent or follow through of badge.team. i expect it will be open source as much as practical. but i just don’t see hackaday having anything to do with that? hackaday routinely provides press exposure for closed source hacks, often without mentioning that’s what they’re doing. i’m actually a little sour that i didn’t learn that raspberry pi is an exceptionally closed device until after i’d bought one and wasted a weekend finding the closed walls in its kernel. i was astonished by how closed the device is, and then doubly astonished that hackaday had somehow not clued me into this fact despite running close to a dozen raspi articles every month for years.
in some sense, i think that’s fine. a lot of uses, you don’t care what’s open and what isn’t. but why pretend to care if you don’t? why pretend to a role you don’t want to fill? i honestly don’t understand.
I know the developers of this project, personally. They are going to release it as open source in the manner I described, I will make sure of that anyway.
I should also point out that they have a history of releasing their projects as open source. https://github.com/badgeteam/
On the other hand, wolfram mathematica is free so I guess I’m ok with the kernel being walled.
If you got your IT knowledge the regular way instead of doing one of those become an Agile Python Senior Scrum Master Developer Architect Team Leader in 10 days courses then you’d be very well aware that most SoCs are incredibly locked down unless you’re a big corp willing to sign a fuckton of NDAs.
In this case, the “SOC” is an ESP32-P4, which is just a microcontroller with dual 400 MHz RISC-V CPUs, some RAM, and some Flash. Like most Espressif MCU modules, it’s programmable using the Arduino IDE, so even if they never open up the source code, it’s effectively a developer board. And meanwhile, it’s not Hackaday making this promise, it’s Jenny List, which is good enough for me.
I appreciate the endorsement :)
The badge teem people take open source seriously.
Hm? We absolutely have covered the proprietary aspects of Raspberry Pi, here’s an article from the first page of “site:hackaday.com raspberry proprietary” search. https://hackaday.com/2017/01/14/blob-less-raspberry-pi-linux-is-a-step-closer/, I can remember like 10 more articles in the same vein. The Pi is simply popular enough, it’s easy for any one of its factors to slip away if it isn’t constantly repeated, there’s too many of them to repeat on an ongoing basis, and the proprietary-ness has mostly defined itself as a constant by now, so people are used to it.
On that note, there’s like dozens of things you could repeat about any popular platform – say, Arduino stdlib is limited, the OG ATMega chips are wildly outdated, shield design is a lil crooked, RPi’s male-header-GPIO approach is a short-circuit risk, Broadcom doesn’t sell RPi chips outside RPF (look up Odroid W), … and, there’s only so much space in our articles. We focus on what’s relevant to the hack.
To be clear, the closed-source parts are a real shame. I do sympathize with the sheer disappointment of it, and, about 12 years ago when I started doing my Pi experiments, it saddened me to realize the scale of closed-ness, too. I work with RPi boards because the benefits outweigh the negatives, oftentimes even for things like battery-powered devices. My advice is – don’t conflate our coverage of uber-popular products like RPi, and Hackaday’s direction, whether collective or individual writers’, that’s going to be a path to madness through oversimplification.
that would make a sweet handheld Linux computer for playing and testing software defined radios and the associated software, tempted to buy one
My thoughts exactly, hopefully someone makes a Digirig addon board for simplicity, seems perfect for digital modes
I know you’re not the only person eyeing it up for SDR work.
As it’s based on a microcontroller (a pretty powerful one with dual 400 MHz RISC-V cores, but still), it has no memory manager unit, which means Linux would need some heavy duty tweaking to build a kernel that will run on it. There IS a Linux build for the ARM Cortex-M3, so we know it can be done, but this isn’t like grabbing a Raspberry Pi and downloading an ISO for it. It IS powerful enough that SDR should be within easy reach, but again, you’re not going to just download a .deb SDR application and install it.
Don’t get me wrong: Both the ESP32-C series and the STM32U5 series are up to heavy duty embedded applications, but expect to build Arduino sketches and uploading rather than just flashing an SD card.
It has an mmu https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32p4/api-reference/system/mm.html
[Farnsworth] voice “Good news!”
You basically can. https://www.clockworkpi.com/uconsole looks just like this
I’ve seen one of these in the flesh, they look great. Built super beefy. Ran off a raspi compute module, looks like you have options. Would be easy to bodge in daughterboards & route coax.
Not cheap, and the open-sourciness of it doesn’t quite match the advertisment.
I should point out, that while very powerful, this processor has no MMU.
Looks exciting, I wonder if it can be fitted with GBA emulation core (either software or FPGA)
FWIW, I successfully ported Quake 1 to the ESP32P4. I’m decently sure a GBA emulator should be doable.
I sort of like this gadget, and I think there could be a market for it, but (as of yet) not for me.
It’s a bit too much like a normal phone (maybe with bluetooth keyboard).
But still, every now and then I’m thinking a bit about some operating system for a microcontroller. But it would have to be cheap, as boards which are capable of running a full blown linux distribution such as the Blueberry Pi start at around 30 EUR. Logging in to a Micropython board with it’s REPL with a remote terminal is probably the best option.
I also still have fond memories of my Psion Organizers. The small keyboard was quite well type-able with two thumbs (when holding) or index fingers (when it’s supported somewhere) It also had a pretty good agenda application, much better then those newfangled phones. I scrapped them due to the very low screen contrast and software / OS incompatibility. There are small Linux PC’s in the Psion form factor, but those cost like EUR 800, which is a bit too much for me.
The previous article on this opened my eyes for the ESP32-P4, and I also think this is a worthy platform for development of whatever embedded applications you can imagine. It has much lower power consumption than a “full blown Linux” machine, which by itself is to me a major selling point. The price point is really set by the peripherals, since for example you can get a Linux machine (Pi Zero W 2) for $15, which is about the same price as an ESP32-P4 dev board. And that €30 Blueberry Pi doesn’t include a monitor or keyboard.
But do we still get a cool badge for why2025?
How is that keyboard made? Is there a way to buy it on its own?
Has anyone in the US successfully pre-ordered one? It looks like all the payment options require either having an EU based checking account, or an existing bank account at any of several European banks that partner with their payment processors (at least as far as I can tell).
If somewhere in the tree of payment methods is a way to use PayPal, a credit card, or a US based checking account I’d be psyched to know about it…
Luckily the answer is yes, many people from the US succeeded in paying. Unfortunately it’s not obvious which payment method to use. Please try the “sepa bank transfer” option, you should be able to complete that payment using paypal. If you have further questions please contact us via any of the contact options on our website nicolaielectronics.nl
Where is my YM2608?
Lovely idea for an addon board!
Freaking interesting. I would add a few more features for a model aimed at communication in “emergency” situations:
more LoRa and RF programmable modules pluggable at the same time (also for relaying)
GPS+Glonass pluggable module.
headphone+mic jack (it appears it’s missing)
Codec2 implementation for low bitrate voice comms (would be a killer app over LoRa)
USB/serial link to use it for low speed small files sharing (say from a laptop/phone) while maintaining voice and text comms, assuming cellular/WiFi aren’t available or are insecure.
HAM radio operators might not like the above (for mostly valid reasons, normally) but again I’ll stress the word “emergency” and the quotes it’s enclosed into.